Since 2002 we've been publishing the httpd log statistics for this site on an annual basis. This gives you some insight into traffic levels, popular pages, and the kinds of search results that bring people to MemeStreams.

From the time we went online (in the fall of 2001) until September of 2003 we saw a fairly constant growth in the number of unique visitors using this site. This year that pattern has changed. The growth, as measured in terms of unique visitors, seems to have leveled off shy of 30,000 people a month, and this year we settled into a static pattern typical of older websites, where more traffic is received in the winter months than in the summer months. As our site is current events focused we also get an occasional boost from popular news stories.

However, while the same number of people are using MemeStreams as were using it a year ago, those people seem to be using it a lot more. In September of 2003 we got 27,825 unique visitors, who visited 101,041 pages on the site. In November of 2004 we got 27,496 unique visitors, but they visited 155,421 pages on the site.

Truth be told, this is probably a more significant change. A lot of those 27 thousand people wash in from a search engine looking for something specific and never return. The vitality of this site is more dependent on the people who stick around a while and actually make use of it. Those people seem to be growing in numbers even as the overall total remains the same.

The main page of the site was hit 259,011 times this year, which works out to about 708 times a day. Thats up from 148,826 last year (which is 408 times a day). Also, in 2003 29% of our traffic came from search engines and 33% came from bookmarks. This year 19% came from search engines and 57% came from bookmarks.

2003 saw the birth of the referrer spammer and they are not going away. The 5 "links from an external page" listed here were the only ones that made the top 20 who I'm absolutely sure aren't spammers. (Honestly, the Netnewswire link may be considered spam, as it is offered by that RSS reader, but its somewhat interesting data and not exactly the same thing as robots that hit your site over and over with no interest in fetching the content.)

If you're interested, you can find the links to older annual statistics here:http://www.memestreams.net/allabout.html